The invention relates to a method for recovering data in a data processing system in which the recovery is carried out exclusively in predetermined units or installations. The invention further relates to a device for carrying out this method.
When using data processing systems, it is frequently necessary to recover data—if possible without data loss—after a system failure or some other system intervention. Recovery typically involves copying data from a recovery medium (e.g. CD, DVD) to the system. This often involves data that requires particular protection and possibly encrypted data, which is to be restored, particularly nondestructively, in a specific memory area of the data processing system. For security reasons, it is further required that the data should be restored only to specific data processing installations selected by the user or to the hardware predetermined by the manufacturer.
Methods for storing or installing data processing programs use, for example, so-called hardware dongles, which link the data to the hardware of the data processing system, or special access elements, such as smart cards with specific codes or other previously assigned release codes, which are relatively complex. Also possible are special device drivers for data readers that enable, for example, access to a compact disc (CD) as a data carrier only as a function of predefined hardware features. This solution is very specific, however, and presumes that the data processing installation is booted from the CD. If external CD-ROM drives are used as the reader, this is possible only with a matching driver and is therefore very inflexible and complex.
Furthermore, conventional recovery methods perform recovery by deleting or overwriting existing data. Often, the recovered data is restored as a single image, recovering the data by copying it from a protected image area of the data carrier. The particular drawback in this case is that the copying process is not nondestructive because the data of at least a partition of the data carrier is deleted.